Day: September 9, 2018

Friends, I rarely ask you to help someone financially, so please pay attention this post.

Journalist and human rights activist Sergei Mokhnatkin needs our help. Mr. Mokhnatkin is sixty-four years old. While he has been serving time in a penal colony, he has been assaulted, had his back broken, had suffocating gas pumped into his cell, and had his personal effects and food stolen. Andrei Krekov, Mr. Mokhnatin’s social defender, arrived yesterday from visiting him in prison.

Mr. Krekov said the wardens at Maximum Security Correctional Colony No. 21 in the village of Iksa, Arkhangelsk Region, where Mr. Mokhnatkin has been serving the last four months of his sentence, have put the inmate on preventive watch as someone “prone to trespassing on sexual freedom and sexual inviolability” [per the wording in the letter reproduced below]. This is yet another humiliation.

Letter from a prison official informing Sergei Mokhnatkin that he had been placed on “preventive watch.” Photo by Andrei Krekov. Courtesy of Julia Lorenz

As of Monday, prison staff refused to give Mr. Mokhnatkin a pen, so he was unable to write anything.

In his letter to me, Mr. Mokhnatkin voiced concern about whether he would be able to pay Mr. Krekov’s trips to the prison as his social defender and, generally, a sense of insecurity about the future. I cannot discuss the particulars of his personal life without his say-so, but I can say that Mr. Mokhnatkin lacks many of the things you and I have.

The only way to protect the journalist and human rights activist from the abuse of prison staff is constant oversight on the social defender’s part. A single one-way trip to the penal colony costs 4,000 rubles [approx. 50 euros] and takes four hours. Nor would it hurt if we were able to raise a little money to see Mr. Mokhnatkin through for awhile after he is released from prison.